Amazon Cuts Affiliate Marketing, Google Versus French Publishers, Streaming Services and Movies

I regret that second step: I want to believe that companies that produce truly great content will have negotiating power with Aggregators, because customers will want what they have to sell. And, in very limited cases, that may be true. Anything beyond the very best of the best, though, risks a Wirecutter-type fate: yes, the investment in content p... See more

The Internet, though, is a world of abundance, and there is a new power that matters: the ability to make sense of that abundance, to index it, to find needles in the proverbial haystack. And that power is held by Google. Thus, while the audiences advertisers crave are now hopelessly fractured amongst an effectively infinite number of publishers, t... See more

It seems to me, then, that the only long-term solution is to acquire customers directly, and to monetize them directly. The Internet is an efficiency machine, which means that closely related objectives, a la publishers seeking to reach more readers and advertisers seeking to reach more customers, are not sufficient; content and business need to be... See more

Notice the progression here: the Wirecutter was genuinely useful content that took a lot of time and expertise to produce; BuzzFeed, Gawker, etc. was rather less useful, but still content that had marginal costs to produce; Honey, meanwhile, was zero marginal cost skimming. In short, the affiliate game grew increasingly commoditized over time.

It seems to me, then, that the only long-term solution is to acquire customers directly, and to monetize them directly.

I regret that second step: I want to believe that companies that produce truly great content will have negotiating power with Aggregators, because customers will want what they have to sell. And, in very limited cases, that may be true. Anything beyond the very best of the best, though, risks a Wirecutter-type fate: yes, the investment in content p... See more

Amazon will become the default for far more people far more quickly. In that case, why give commoditized content producers anything more than peanuts? It is not as if they will suddenly stop producing the affiliate content, or if they do, not be replaced by others willing to.

Here is the cold hard reality for media companies: if you don’t have access to customers — whether because of the Internet generally, or the pandemic specifically — you don’t have pricing power. Actually, that doesn’t go far enough: if you don’t have access to customers’ wallets, you don’t have pricing power.

Affiliate fees have certainly been a big deal for a few years now. Back in 2016 the New York Times acquired The Wirecutter, validating the idea of affiliate fees as a publishing business model. Buzzfeed dove in head first over the following year, along with the publications formerly known as Gawker. The mania seems to have reached its peak last Nov... See more